Comments on Cybernetics and Art, Particularly Painting: ASC

My view of painting has been deeply influenced by cybernetics, since my introduction to Heinz von Foerster twenty years ago. My view of painting has been deeply influenced by cybernetics, since my introduction to Heinz von Foerster twenty years ago. At that time I had already been involved with painting as a daily practice for over two decades, and had been frustrated by prevailing theoretical approaches to art as ways of understanding and advancing what I was doing. These approaches seemed to stall out at the threshold of creative practice as lived by a practitioner in art. The principles of cybernetics fit with my intuitions about painting, and helped to steer my practice of painting into surprising adventures. These principles also changed my teaching of art, as cybernetic insights and analyses helped me to understand creative process in my students as well as in myself. The comments that follow are very brief samples of some of my thinking on the matter of cybernetics and painting.